Papers Challenge Israel on Denial of Policy on Beating

Israeli newspaper reports today challenged officially stated policy that soldiers only beat Arab protesters in the act of rioting or resisting arrest.

The daily tabloid Hadashot, the liberal Haaretz newspaper and the English-language Jerusalem Post published reports claiming Arabs were beaten indiscriminately or after being taken into custody.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who visited a blood-stained wall in the occupied West Bank where soldiers allegedly beat prisoners, vowed Tuesday to investigate any wrongful beatings of Arabs.

“There is no policy of punishing by beatings,” Rabin said.

Witnesses Quoted

Eyewitnesses cited by the Jerusalem Post said soldiers had regularly beaten detainees at the wall, located near Manara Square in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Menachem Shizaf, a correspondent for the Hadashot newspaper, quoted an unidentified 20-year-old soldier from the Gaza Strip as saying he was given orders to beat young Arabs in door-to-door sweeps through refugee camps. He said the policy was causing division among soldiers.

“We were given orders that in order that people in the camps be aware of the army presence during curfews, we must knock on doors, enter inside and take the men out,” the soldier was quoted as saying. “The younger ones especially, we were to separate and beat.”

He said troops stopped at every other house.

“We stood the males outside with their faces against a wall, and while questioning them, the soldiers beat them with clubs,” he was quoted as saying. “Those who delayed opening doors were taken to a gathering place called the ‘square of arrests.’ On the way, they were beaten even worse.”

An army spokeswoman said it was difficult to respond to the report because neither the soldier nor the army unit was named in the Hadashot report.

Today, for the second day in a row, the level of incidents appeared to be escalating after a period of relative calm.

A CBS crew was beaten by soldiers in Gaza, CBS bureau chief Terry Plantinga said. The army said it was looking into the report but had not yet received an official complaint.

In the Arab neighborhood of Anata on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem, a squad of police and three border policemen armed with M-16 assault rifles and clubs fired tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into a crowd of about 100 demonstrating youths. The Palestinians threw stones and the smoking tear gas canisters back at the officers.

Stones Thrown at Soldiers

In the Gaza Strip, demonstrators set up roadblocks and threw stones at Israeli soldiers near Beit Hanoun. Soldiers responded with rubber bullets and tear gas, the agency said.

Meanwhile, the Palestine Liberation Organization said today it plans to defy Israel’s expulsion policy and attempt to return 200 Palestinian exiles to their homes in the Israeli-occupied territories within the next two weeks.

A spokesman for the PLO’s Paris office said the 200 are among 2,500 Palestinians deported by Israel since it seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt in 1967 during the Six-Day War. It was not clear where the 200 Palestinians were living now.